(available on iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, free, or $1.99 for premium)
Story Creator is an app that gives students the ability to easily create and share their own multimedia story books. This includes pictures, videos, text, audio, and even freehand drawing. What makes Story Creator more compelling than similar apps is its built-in narration functionality. Once a student adds their picture and caption for a given page, they can then record their narration for that page, be that reading the text verbatim, or adding some supplemental commentary.
Benefits of Tool or App
Story Creator has benefits for both teachers and students alike:
Content Creation - The ability for students to create unique pieces of work. The stories that they are authoring are a great way to apply concepts that they have learned in the classroom, and have a tangible outcome.
Content Delivery - The app can also feature teachers as the creators. They can put some of their content/curriculum into a narrative story form, and then share the story with all of their students. The students would be able to download and then read/view the story.
Narration - Being able to have audio narration over top of images and text captions can be a powerful learning tool. It could help students to read by both seeing and hearing the words, or it could be great for foreign language learning, providing pronunciations of words that students are reading.
Creativity - This app provides a great opportunity to be creative. They can meet their learning objectives through displaying their mastery of a concept, but also by using their creative license and record their own pictures, videos, and audio files.
Constraints of Tool or App
Here are some constraints inherent to Story Creator:
Text Limits - Each page can only display one line of text. The size does scale down, so if the sentence is longer it will still fit, but it will be difficult to read as the font size decreases.
Fixed Layout - There is only on layout for story pages, where a single image or video is in a landscape layout and centered on the page, with the text appearing underneath. This limits options for creative use of multiple pictures and design layouts.
Media Input - While the app allows you to import pictures and video from many different sources, the live capture options are limited. You can record live audio from within the app, but you can't take live pictures or video from within the app. You would instead have to go to a separate app, take a picture, and then go back to Story Creator to import that picture.
Account Creation - In order to share stories, you have to either have a Facebook account, or create a separate Story Builder account. This could result in an administrative burdon to create and keep track of the accounts.
This app is a fun way to tell stories. One example of this is creating a photo journal of a vacation. The student can take pictures of places that they visit, record videos of events, and then caption them all so that they remember what happened. Afterwards, they can share their stories with their friends, who could learn about your vacation before you're even home!
Teachers
This app can be a powerful tool for teachers that are looking for ways to flip their classroom. The teacher could create a multimedia lesson, using the images, text, and audio/video recording tools, and then share the lesson with all of their students! Their students could watch and learn from the lesson outside of the classroom as a homework assignment, and then spend classroom time for activities instead of lecture.
Description of Tool or App
Story Creator
(available on iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, free, or $1.99 for premium)
Story Creator is an app that gives students the ability to easily create and share their own multimedia story books. This includes pictures, videos, text, audio, and even freehand drawing. What makes Story Creator more compelling than similar apps is its built-in narration functionality. Once a student adds their picture and caption for a given page, they can then record their narration for that page, be that reading the text verbatim, or adding some supplemental commentary.
Benefits of Tool or App
Story Creator has benefits for both teachers and students alike:
Constraints of Tool or App
Here are some constraints inherent to Story Creator:
How To Use Tool or App
Here is a how-to video that I recorded, using the Reflector app, Camtasia screen capture, and Screencast for hosting:Here is a direct link to the video recording: http://www.screencast.com/t/qbrHAcHJm2
Original Artifact of Tool or App (created by someone in your house)
Here is a video recording of a sample story in action:Here is a direct link to the video recording:
http://www.screencast.com/t/TwtkhUKMo7v0http://www.screencast.com/t/TwtkhUKMo7v0
IDEAS for Tool or App
Students
This app is a fun way to tell stories. One example of this is creating a photo journal of a vacation. The student can take pictures of places that they visit, record videos of events, and then caption them all so that they remember what happened. Afterwards, they can share their stories with their friends, who could learn about your vacation before you're even home!Teachers
This app can be a powerful tool for teachers that are looking for ways to flip their classroom. The teacher could create a multimedia lesson, using the images, text, and audio/video recording tools, and then share the lesson with all of their students! Their students could watch and learn from the lesson outside of the classroom as a homework assignment, and then spend classroom time for activities instead of lecture.